‘We can’t go there. It’s full of drug dealers.’ Thus laboured my beloved’s worn refrain whenever I suggested we explore the mysterious woodland at the top of our road. It took a pandemic, and the dawning realisation that we had exhausted all other fruitful walks within a one-hour radius during the first lockdown, for the…
Tag: World War 1
Armistice 2018: Beyond the Glass by Antonia White (1954)
Set in the twenties and the last in the ‘Frost in May’ series, Antonia White’s semi-autobiographical account of a young woman’s descent into madness after an intense love affair with a soldier too swiftly follows a failed marriage includes the following haunting scene appropriate for this poignant Sunday. During High Mass, requiem is being sung…
Celebrating International Women’s Day 2018!
Following our posts to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2016 and 2017, we’re back again for #IWD2018 with a bounty of books to explore woman’s place in the world. Set in Rosenau, an isolated alpine farming community in Austria, Homestead by Rosina Lippi begins with a mysterious love letter – its intended recipient potentially being…
The Englishman At War, edited by John Freeman (1941)
I must start this week’s Random Book of the Week with a confession: a long line of theft led to me possessing this book. I ‘borrowed’ it from my parental abode a few years ago, my dad had himself ‘borrowed’ it from his own parental abode many years before that, and we think my Granddad…
Letters From A Lost Generation – First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
As we come to the close of this week’s First World War theme commemorating the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, a book that shows the true human cost of war through the lens of one family. Letters From A Lost Generation is a collection of letters between Vera Brittain, her brother Edward (who fought…
Field Hospital and Flying Column by Violetta Thurstan
On the eve of the centenary of the Somme, and to continue this week’s First World War theme, I present Field Hospital and Flying Column, Violetta Thurstan’s account of her experiences as a Red Cross nurse across a First World War-torn Europe. Thurstan was born in East Sussex in 1879, educated in Germany and trained…
Scars Upon My Heart – Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, selected by Catherine Reilly
One might legitimately view war at the time of The Great War as a largely masculine endeavour – started by male politicians in parliament, fought by male civilians in the trenches. The poems of Wilfred Owen et al which emerged from the trenches are justifiably famous examples of (some) men seeking to make sense of…
Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff
To continue this week’s First World War theme in the run up to the centenary of the Somme on 1 July, a 1928 play which brings to life the most evocative of First World War images – the trenches. Journey’s End is set in the British trenches near Saint-Quentin, Aisne, in 1918, as officers prepare…
War In European History by Michael Howard
On July 1st 2016 we will commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the start of the bloodiest battle in human history, the 141-day Battle of the Somme that claimed 1 million lives. Therefore, this week at Brontë’s Page Turners we will be looking at a range of books that get under the skin of the trauma…
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